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THE
TOWN PAPER
VOL. 5, NO. 5 -- WINTER 2003

Main Street Diary: Coatesville, Pa.

By Sandy Sorlien

August 26, 2003: I'm driving toward Coatesville,
the poorest city in Pennsylvania; it is located, perversely, in the richest
county in Pennsylvania. It's a small city of 13,000; I'd call it a small
town but local officials bristle if you say that. Unlike some of the other
industrial river towns in this part of the state, you can't see it from
the highway but must first descend sinuously on Route 82 along the Brandywine
Creek for a mile between thickly forested hillsides, until a spectacular
stone railroad bridge -- they call it "the high bridge" -- looms ahead.
Multiple soaring archways frame your first views of the massive black
steel mill sheds that define this place in time and function. You may
never see buildings as big as these built again in your lifetime, Super
WalMart notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, dramatic local character gives way to botched civic entry,
as the intersection of 82 and the main street, US 30 (the Lincoln Highway),
cries out for better buildings and better signage and better signal timing.
I sit idling with one car in front of me for about four minutes before
I'm allowed to turn left, staring at a useless grassy patch and an unarticulated
one-story storefront stuccoed in the blandest dun.

The huge mill property is to the right and the main commercial district
runs off to the left. I pull the car over into one of many empty metered
spaces at about 5:30 p.m. It's drizzling and gloomy; car traffic is steady
through town. The people on the sidewalk don't seem to be going anywhere.
They're hanging out in shop doorways, singly or in a bunch, waiting for
something to happen -- waiting for a stranger to come to town, perhaps.
There seems to be very little purposeful activity in downtown Coatesville.
Yet the fact that they are outside looking for something is, to me, a
good sign. They haven't given up on Coatesville yet.

I take a few dim pictures and leave. There are some good buildings, but
fewer than I'd hoped, and the light is poor.

October 22: I return to Coatesville for six days to participate
in a design charrette sponsored by the Knight Fellowship Program of the
University of Miami School of Architecture. Now the light is spectacular,
golden sunlight slanting through russet leaves. The goal of the charrette
is a master plan for development and infill on 80 acres of downtown, including
part of the steel mill site. I'm here to observe, learn, kibitz and take
photographs. I bring my view camera but have no time to use it; instead
I end up speed-shooting about 600 digital pictures for drawing reference
and PowerPoint imagery.

This charrette involves several days of public meetings on topics including
transit, mill redevelopment, parks and rivers, traffic and schools. As
a Main Street maven, I am most interested in the meeting about the downtown
business area. Old postcards show it was once called Main; the charrette
report will recommend that it should be so again. Rick Chellman, the traffic
engineer for the charrette team, asserts vehemently, "This section of
Lincoln Highway should become Main Street, and PennDOT should be made
aware of that, so it is designed to behave as a street again, and not
as a highway."

The Lincoln Highway is, in fact, known as "America's Main Street," for
it was the first coast-to-coast motor route. The roadway connected New
York City and San Francisco starting in 1915, at least in a primitive,
chassis-rattling form.

October 25: I spend an hour shooting some Main Street scenes for
Carmen Rivera, one of the Miami graduate students on the charrette team.
She said, "Get me pictures of encroachments on the public right-of-way;
storefront setbacks of various depths; examples of signage perpendicular
to the sidewalk for pedestrians or parallel to the street for vehicles;
examples of good and bad paseos (passages between streets); examples of
ugly parking lots."

Now that I see it in the sunshine, the street has some beautiful spots,
including a pleasant paseo and several restored live/work buildings. There
has already been a partial facelift coordinated by the firm of new urbanist
planner Tom Comitta. The Knight charrette is building on the groundwork
by Comitta and others. Comitta says, "The vision thing around here is
getting more finely tuned every year."

October 26: A bunch of us are driving around in a van scouting
Coatesville neighborhoods as Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, head of the design
team, points out places she wants us to photograph. We loop around between
the mostly black East side and the mostly-white West side, up and over
the surrounding hills, along clean streets lined with twins and rowhouses.
Near the end of the ride Lizz smiles and sighs, saying, "I fall in love
with every town I work in."

October 28: The charrette is over; more than 200 people come through
the rain to the final presentation at Gordon Elementary School. Afterwards
we go to a tavern called Mr. E's, a mile north of Main Street. (We are
already calling it by its true name.) We've learned that there is no grocery
store whatsoever in downtown Coatesville. I'm talking with some locals
at the bar, and I ask them when they last had a market and where it was.
"Three years ago," a woman named Laurie tells me. "It's that boarded-up
red building next to the Rite-Aid parking lot. It was an A&P or something.
The shoplifting was killing them; even the employees were robbing them
blind." Well, this is hearsay, but I've already photographed the building
because it is a terrible eyesore in the heart of town, flanked by two
more terrible eyesores, surface parking lots extending back from Main
to the next street, Harmony.

Carmen may soon design charming paseos or infill rowhouses for places
like that; investment in downtown may bring another, better-managed grocery
store to Main Street; the commuter rail line may one day stop there at
a spiffy new station, and I will return to Coatesville in a few years
hoping to see them.

 Dates: October 22-27, 2003
 Team: 28-member charrette team consisted of Knight Program
Fellows, graduate students in University of Miami School of Architecture's
Suburb and Town Design Program, University of Miami faculty, and others
 Site: Coatesville is a city of approximately 8,000 people
located 40 minutes outside Philadelphia. It was a booming steel industry
city in the 1950s and 1960s but has experienced three decades of economic
decline and urban decay due to events including dislocation of steel industry
jobs and construction of a regional mall in a neighboring town.
 Scope: The goal of the charrette was to suggest ways to revitalize
some 80 acres of the core city while maintaining and reinforcing Coatesville's
unique character.
 Quote: "Coatesville is a classic rust belt case of a small
city almost wholly dependent on one heavy industry that has now contracted
to less than one-tenth its former size, exerting a negative impact on
virtually every dimension we speak of in creating and sustaining livable
cities. There are many communities facing similar challengers, and Coatesville
can be a prism for cities in the region and around the country to envision
a range of possibilities for rebuilding."
 Charles C. Bohl, director of the Knight Program
 Sponsors: The Knight Program in Community Building, City
of Coatesville, Redevelopment Authority of City of Coatesville
 Public Involvement: Eleven stakeholder meetings plus the
opening and closing presentations and a mid-charrette pinup and discussion.